


Backbone

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Dragon Quest III
Genre: Gen, Humor, Mid-Canon, Minor Character(s), Original Character(s), POV Alternating, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-08
Updated: 2010-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:09:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there are disgruntled villagers, errant heroes, a quixotic housewife, a glorious Revolution, and a catapult. Based on the GBA Remix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Pale sunlight, tinged with orange, glinted off the stove and pooled over the counters and wooden floor. Hanging above the sink basin was a cheery dish towel, graying from use, embroidered with pictures of smiling vegetables and a generic maxim about the value of small-town life. The equally cheery curtains above it were pinned in place to frame a view of the southern landscape. The window itself was open, and there was a tiny rustling of feathers as a red bird alit on the dewy sill.

Before a sense of early-morning serenity could settle in, the kitchen door opened with a sharp creak and split the floor in front of it with its shadow. Two lavender slippers shuffled in, their owner muttering and yawning. With some difficulty, the bathrobe-clad woman managed to cross the kitchen and reach the cabinets, from which she retrieved a frying pan. As she stumbled back to the stove and attempted to light it, the bird twittered.

Her eyes narrowed. Leaving the flames to their own devices, she turned and stalked toward the source of the noise, nose twitching. As the bird took off in a panic, she leaned out the window and squinted into the distance. Dark figures were just visible descending one of the foothills that surrounded the village.

"There's evil afoot," she said aloud, turning back and glancing around the room. "We must make preparations." 

Gripping the frying pan by the handle, she hoisted it over her head and clenched her left hand into a fist. "Today," she announced, lowering her arm to point the pan out the window, "justice will be served!" With a flourish she thrust her left arm back towards the stove, catching her sleeve on fire in the process.

Oblivious, she had begun rooting through the cabinets when the smoke alerted her to a problem. 

Several seconds later a panicked man rushed into the kitchen and found her batting out the flames with a cutting board. "Oh, good gods, Dora," he sighed, slumping back against the doorframe. "It's not even noon yet and you've already set yourself on fire?"

"Evil's afoot," she said, patting out the last of the flames. "You'd better wear this to work today." She presented him with a large iron pot.

Sighing, he took it from her and dropped it onto the nearest chair. "Just once," he asked miserably, watching her stack kitchen implements on the counter, "couldn't breakfast be afoot instead?"

* * *

"Is that a town?"

"Yeah."

"Good."

That had been the extent of their conversation for the last hour. Tempers were high and moods were sour, which was reason enough for Ped Xing and Quinn to hold their tongues. And Xing had never been much inclined to make small talk while carrying a wounded comrade on his back. 

For her part, Quinn found it difficult to string together words when every step reminded her of how badly those zombified wolves had wounded her. The blood loss was making her dizzy to the point that she hadn't been sure the town creeping into her vision wasn't a hallucination. Sometimes she wished Charlotte would at least try to conserve some energy for healing spells, but saying so would have been futile.

"What the hell kind of cleric are you?" came Nars's voice from behind. Quinn frowned and tried to ignore the latest revival of an argument that never ended productively.

Charlotte snorted. "Next time you fall on your own sword, I'm letting you bleed to death."

Nars laughed dismissively. "Yeah, right. I'm the son of Ortega!"

"You sure?" Charlotte's voice was a smirk. "I mean, Ortega was out adventuring all the time, and that shopkeeper lived right next—"

Sounds of an epic battle erupted, complete with creative insults and, judging from the level of the shrieking, hair-pulling.

Quinn's weight shifted painfully as Xing stopped and sighed. As he turned, Quinn saw that Nars and Charlotte had tumbled to the grass, tufts of each other's hair clenched in their fists. Their howling made her ears ring.

A single kick flung them several feet apart. Crossing his arms, Xing loomed over them, looking as menacing as he could with Quinn clinging to his back.

"Don't act your ages," he said flatly, then turned again and resumed walking towards the town.

"Like you're so much older," Nars muttered, but Quinn noted that he now marched silently, if sullenly, in the lead. It wouldn't have done for him not to lead the party into a new town.

Blond hair appeared in Quinn's peripheral vision as Charlotte leaned in next to her ear. "And he thinks _I'm_ a bitch," the cleric huffed, then fell into place bringing up the rear. 

Quinn sighed again and wished she were back at Ruida's.

* * *

It was shaping up to be a slow day, at least in the shop. Drumming his fingers on the countertop, Stanley hummed nervously and cast another glance at the door separating his store from his living space. Although Dora had been almost frantic in her efforts to prepare their home for invasion, once she'd armed herself with various kitchen utensils, she'd seemed to calm down and wait. Stanley was unspeakably grateful that she'd decided not to go on the offensive this time. Half the town was already wary of doing business with him.

Letting out a slow breath, Stanley took a claw from under the counter and began to polish it on the off-chance that he'd have a customer.

"No! Weapons first!" came a shout from outside.

Stanley jumped, then calmed himself and began to arrange the wares on display. Heroes were something of a mixed blessing. While they bought enough to keep him on comfortable financial ground for months at a stretch, they also had a tendency to be foul-smelling, obnoxious, and randomly destructive. Dora had been in a snit for weeks after the last group had trashed their bedroom looking for valuables. And while Stanley was of the opinion that people saving the world were entitled to some sacrifices from the people they saved, Dora most certainly was not. Praying that Dora wouldn't hear anything, he put on his best business smile and waited.

Outside, the argument continued.

"No, you _can't_ shop alone! You won't buy for anyone else!"

"Well, I'm the leader, so you have to do what I say!"

"Arrogant son of a—"

There was the sound of a heavy blow, followed by the buzz of lowered voices. Presently a teenaged boy sauntered into the shop, looking triumphant.

Stanley's smile stiffened. The young ones were always the worst, and this one, with his defiantly unruly hair, cocky grin, and general air of needing constant attention, looked to be an ordeal.

"It's not a compromise when you get your way, moron," muttered the girl who followed him in—a cleric, if her garb was any indication. She shot a menacing look at the boy's back before rushing off to examine the spears.

Outside, a muscular young man carrying a bundle of blood-soaked wizard's robes passed by the window, heading for the temple. Stanley's mouth twitched. It had been a long time since he'd been visited by a party of teenagers, and the experience had not been a positive one.

The leader marched to the counter, his ego shining through his green eyes. "I am Nars," he announced as Stanley struggled to look impressed, "son and heir of the great Ortega and the one prophesied by legend to defeat the Demon Lord."

"Great," Stanley replied with all the enthusiasm he could muster. "Would you like to—er, miss, could you please not—"

He was interrupted by a crash as the cleric swung the spear she had been trying out into a rack of shields. Pressing his palm to his forehead, he took a deep breath and said, "Please don't play with the weapons."

"It was Nars's fault," she said quickly before grabbing one of the fallen scale shields.

Nars made a rude gesture at her, then turned his attention back to the shopkeeper. "Right. So we'll be taking a spear, a scale shield, and—is that a claw? We'll take that, too. And some iron armor."

"_Two_ spears," the girl said irritably. "Two scale shields. And a fighting suit."

Breathing a sigh of relief at the thought of ridding himself of the two, Stanley picked up his abacus and began adding. "That comes to 4,470 gold pieces," he said, mentally calculating how long that would support him and his wife. "Would you like to sell any—"

"Woah, woah, woah," the leader interrupted. "I don't think I heard you right. I'm the _son of Ortega_. You can't charge me! I'm saving the world!"

That was a bit much, even for someone as long-suffering as Stanley. "Now see here," he began, "I have to eat—"

"Without me," Nars shot back, already strapping on his new suit of armor, "you'd _be eaten_ by monsters. Ha! No witty comeback for that, eh?"

"Actually," Stanley said, "we've been doing just fine for generations on our own."

Nars chose to ignore that as he hefted his new spear. "Well," he said, "that's that. Now if you'll stand aside, we'll check your furniture for valuables and be on our way."

Defeated, Stanley slumped into his chair and stuck his wife's pot on his head as the two adventurers made their way past him. There was, he decided, simply no way for his day to get worse.

But when the sound of the opening door was followed first by a war cry and then by the sound of a frying pan connecting several times with human flesh, he changed his mind.

* * *

"Thanks," Quinn said, nodding in the general direction of both the priest and the altar as she rose. The way she saw it, it couldn't hurt to show a bit of gratitude after being brought back from the brink of death.

The priest called his blessings after them as Quinn and Xing stepped out into the streets.

"The other two should be finished looting soon," Xing said, disapproval creeping into his tone. "We should probably make sure they got equipment for us."

Quinn had scarcely begun to nod when the sounds of pandemonium erupted from the vicinity of the weapon store. In her experience, this sort of thing usually ended with a lot of screaming and unhappiness for all involved.

She caught Xing's eye. He nodded slowly.

"There's a place in Romaly," she said, "where you can get excellent sandwiches for cheap."

"Sounds promising." A number of curious villagers were heading southwest. "How's your magic?"

"Good enough for a quick Return spell." As Xing put a hand on her arm, an excited squawking lured a few more passers-by toward the weapon shop. Quinn found it surprisingly easy to ignore them as she banished the world in a puff of sorcery.

* * *

Donning the pot had turned out to be a good idea. Not only was Stanley visually protected from the chaos in his home, but he was also being politely ignored by people who didn't know how to approach a man protected by a piece of kitchenware.

So it was with great reluctance that he removed his helmet when someone tapped on it.

"Excuse me, sir," said an embarrassed-looking young man, "but I think your wife is locking two travelers in your cellar."

"They're adventurers," Stanley replied, returning to his haven under the pot. His next words echoed around his head: "If I let them out, they'll probably burn down the store."

"But surely you can't just—"

"Dora wouldn't let me through, anyway," he said, managing to sound both apologetic and annoyed. Once he'd given the young man sufficient time to wander off, Stanley tipped the pot up far enough to glance out and confirm that, yes, his shop was indeed full of his gawking neighbors. Most of them were wandering toward the kitchen to see if Dora intended to explain herself. The general tide of opinion seemed to be that knocking out travelers and imprisoning them with the dry goods reflected poorly on Kazave's hospitality.

When he was certain no one was paying him any attention, Stanley took the bags containing his cash reserves and small valuables out from beneath the counter. He had no doubt that his home and business would go up in flames by the end of it all, so the best course of action was to wait things out from far enough away to be spared the sight of the smoke.

Five minutes later Stanley had converted the pot into a vessel for a few prized possessions and set off for the Pachisi Track in the south. If he was lucky, he'd get to see a few adventurers zapped senseless by the electric fields. That never failed to brighten his day.

* * *

"This is indeed a delicious sandwich."

"Agreed."

"We should have more."

"Yes. And then we should wait here until we're hungry enough for even more."

"Absolutely."

* * *

The crowd was getting restless. It seemed like bad form to say "You can't just lock people in your cellar," but standing around looking patiently disapproving wasn't doing the trick. 

Part of the problem was Dora's refusal to acknowledge the awkwardness of the scene. She hummed to herself as she stacked furniture and armor on top of the cellar door, and when she'd run out of immediately available heavy objects, she'd moved on to putting her utensils back into her cabinets. The on-lookers shuffled their feet as they waited for someone to take the initiative.

At last Dora seemed to have arranged everything to her liking. Gripping a frying pan like a club, she clambered to the top of her barricade and bellowed, "Citizens of Kazave!"

"Yes," said the tavern owner hurridly, deciding that the time to ignore social niceties had come, "about that, we the citizens don't particularly like what you're—"

Dora clanged the pan against a suit of armor as if she were banging a gavel. When no one else seemed inclined to speak, she drew herself up as to look as much like a commanding officer as anyone wearing a purple housecoat could. "Citizens of Kazave!" she repeated, eyeing them each in turn. "How many times have so-called adventurers broken into your homes and _stolen_ from you? How many times has a priceless heirloom been looted from your own dresser? How many times has your child's favorite toy been wrested from his little hands?"

A silence followed, during which most of assembled stared at their feet, if only to avoid meeting Dora's gaze. Previous adventurer raids had taught them never to stare down a maniac holding a blunt object.

"What right do they have?" she continued. "Who are they to plunder as they please? We are not their servants! We are not here to be used!"

The innkeepers's wife, who'd had a spat with her husband the night before, murmurred agreement.

It was all the encouragement Dora needed. "Who cares about adventurers?" she shouted. "They're a gold piece a dozen! We, my fellow citizens of Kazave, _we_ are what really matters in this world. While they're off running errands for lazy kings, we're keeping civilization alive! While they rob us blind, we create the very weapons that allow them to keep us oppressed! While they demand special favors for killing wild animals, we keep our village secure against storms, raids, and economic depression!"

Either the erratic movements of the frying pan were growing persuasive, or Dora was. The crowd wasn't entirely certain which was responsible for it, but a curious feeling of solidarity was sweeping through the room. The innkeeper let out a confused cry of "Down with the king of Romaly!"

"Why do we suffer them?" Dora persisted. "Why do we still honor the grave of a wandering rogue who liked to slaughter bears? Why do we keep these ne'er-do-well marauders in power?" 

The tavern owner, who wasn't good with rhetorical questions, suggested, "Because they're big and have weapons?"

Dora thumped the pan on a chair. "Precisely! And it's time for that to _change_!"

The assembled considered, and at length the item store owner asked, "Do we get to redress our grievances?" 

"Of course! This is all about righting the wrongs of the mock-heroic regime!"

The item store owner nodded his approval. He put a lot of stock in grievances.

With a dramatic flourish, Dora pointed the frying pan at her audience. "And now I ask you, fellow citizens of Kazave: Are we united?"

The villagers cheered. They hadn't heard a good call to arms in living memory.

Dora leapt down from the barricade, grabbed a handful of dish towels, and led her troop into the weapon store proper. "Arm yourselves with what you can and pile the rest on top of the cellar," she said, climbing up on the counter to supervise. "I hereby declare this building the official military headquarters of the People's Republic of Kazave!"

There was more cheering, broken by little scuffles over some of the shinier helmets.

Dora beamed and began sketching on the towels with one of Stanley's markers.

* * *

"Ooh, Nars," cooed one of half a dozen puff-puff girls, "you're so strong."

"And handsome," sighed another. 

"I think we should all be naked," suggested a third.

"Wake up, you moron!" said a fourth.

"Then we could feed you grapes," added a fifth.

"And then we could—" began a sixth, but Nars cut her off with a wave of his hand. 

One of these things was not like the others, but it was taking his brain a moment to work out the problem. It wasn't terribly conducive to thought that all six girls were prancing around in various stages of undress.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," one of them whispered seductively. Before he'd had time to process the message, a searing pain shot through his groin.

Nars awoke with a gasp. Eyes watering, he made a brave effort to focus on his surroundings instead of his agony. All signed pointed to "unpromising." As far as he could tell, he was lying someone cold, dusty, and dark, with only a little torchlight illuminating a collection of barrels and bags. It also illuminated Charlotte, who stood over him with a scowl and nudged him with her foot.

"It's about time you got up," she snapped. "You got me into this, so now you can get me out."

Now that the more acute pain was wearing off, Nars noticed that his head was throbbing. A brief, confused memory of a frying pan floated through his mind.

"What are you talking about?" Nars winced as he got to his feet. "I didn't get us into anything!" The motion rattled his thoughts, and the pieces fell together: "You kicked me!"

Charlotte put her hands on her hips. "'Look at me! I'm the son of Ortega! I'm too special to pay for anything!'" she said in what Nars assumed was meant to be his voice. "You idiot. Some psycho knocked us out and dumped us in a cellar, from the looks of it. And I was waking you up."

Nars fumbled for a retort and came up with, "Oh, yeah? Just wait till I wake _you_ up." Resolving to think of a better one later, he turned away and found a ladder behind him. He scrambled up it and tried to force open the overhead door.

"Don't bother," Charlotte said. "I already tried Infernos on it, and it's not budging." When he continued pushing at it, the ladder shook wildly and threw him to the floor.

Nars bared his teeth at her as he got up. "When I'm the legendary hero, I'm going to have you lynched," he said. "No one treats the son of Ortega this way."

She shook her head. "Tsk, tsk. Didn't I already mention the shopkeep—"

His tackle knocked her back into a stack of barrels. She retaliated by scratching his face, and they spent the next several minutes rolling around in a tangle of chokeholds and hairpulls. At last they broke away from each other, wheezing.

"You're officially out of the party," he said.

"Fine," she returned. "I'm forming my own party, and you're not invited."

They glared at each other, then snapped in unison, "How old are you, _five_?"

* * *

The village priest had just finished hiding the temple funds when a gang of armed villagers marched through the door, led by the weapon store owner's wife. Congratulating himself on his foresight, the priest smiled beatifically and said, "Ah, disciplines of divinity. What brings you to our temple?"

The woman—Dora, was it? His memory was getting spotty these days—planted both hands on the altar and regarded him critically. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the presence of her bathrobe. "Are the gods on the side of the People's Republic of Kazave?" she asked at length.

"Absolutely," the priest said. In his experience the gods didn't mind this sort of association very much, especially since it usually blew over in a few days. Besides, the gods wouldn't want their loyal servant to end up on the wrong ends of assorted weapons and farming implements.

Dora nodded. "Good. Then we hereby declare this the official temple of the People's Religion of Kazave!"

The villagers cheered. The priest did not.

"The People's _what_?" he managed.

But Dora had already climbed atop the altar and begun waving something—was that a frying pan?—at the audience. "We have the blessings of the gods!" she declared. "No longer will this holy place serve the selfish needs of adventurers, my friends. Henceforth, the people alone shall worship and receive freely!"

The priest, whose policy of advance payment had always made his dealings with adventurers smooth and profitable, decided that it was time to protest. "But this temple is part of a much larger organized religion—"

"Corrupted by the mock-heroic regime!" Dora's thunder would not be easily stolen. "The gods themselves are on our side!" 

One of the villagers sidled up to the altar. "So can I be the new priest?" he asked.

Before Dora could reply, the priest raised his fist and cried, "Long live the People's Republic of Kazave!"

The upstart slunk away as Dora grinned. "As a proud member of the People's Republic of Kazave," she said, "do you solemnly swear to turn away all adventurers and see only to the needs of honest townsfolk?"

Honest townsfolk did not, in the priest's experience, need the services whose fees supported him in the manner to which he was accustomed. But he steeled himself, remembering that these things never lasted, and said, "Of course. May the blessings of the gods be with the People's Republic of Kazave."

Dora applauded and pulled a towel from the pocket of her robe. "Hang this on your door," she instructed, herding her little army outside. "Come, let us prepare the way of the future!"

_In a few days, this will all blow over._ Letting the thought run through his head like a mantra, the priest looked down at the towel, squinted, and held it up for examination.

Black marker formed the silhouette of what was probably meant to be a farmer, judging by the presence of a pitchfork. A solid red circle surrounded him. Above it was written "THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF KAZAVE," and under the picture was added "hereby approves of and pledges protection to this honest establishment." In the lower left was a sketch of a burly, bearded man with an ax, over which had been drawn a red "X." "No Adventurers on Pain Of Eradication" filled the space beside it.

The priest was impressed. He hadn't thought Dora could spell "eradication."

With a little sigh, the priest picked up a tack and went to deface the temple entrance. Temporarily, of course. The gods would understand.

* * *

Nars sat brooding on a barrel, keeping a wary eye on Charlotte. After another, nastier fistfight had led to the realization that they'd both been disarmed, irritation levels were peaking. Thank the gods they'd found something chalky enough to demarcate their respective halves of the room.

That had been a tricky business, though. Neither of them was willing to cede the cellar door to the other, and they'd ended up painstakingly chalking each rung of the ladder, then dividing the door itself. In a stroke of good fortune, Nars had found much more food in his half than Charlotte had. If all else failed, at least he'd have the satisfaction of outlasting her. All he had to do was train himself to survive on a diet of dried meat.

A happy squeal from the other side of the room caught his attention.

"You may have the food," Charlotte announced, parading out of the shadows with a bottle in her hand, "but _I_ have the alcohol."

Nars grunted and turned his attention back to the wall.

Vindictive humming and the popping of a cork reached his ears, followed by Charlotte saying, "Now all I have to do is sit back, drink up, and wait for Xing and Quinn to get here."

"Hmph." Nars tapped his fingers on the barrel. "What makes you think they'll come, anyway?"

"Well, you hired them, didn't you? They have to save you. It's in their contract."

He spun to face her with a snarl. "No one saves the son of Ortega!"

"Fine. Then we'll leave you in the cellar." Before Nars could form a response, Charlotte wrinkled her nose and said, "The wine smells a little weird."

"You smell weirder."

"Whatever. _You_ haven't bathed since Reeve." 

"I don't have to. Heroes are supposed to smell manly."

With an exaggerated shudder, Charlotte disappeared into the darkness again. She returned with another bottle of wine and a corkscrew.

"It's no fun drinking alone," she said. "Trade you a bottle for a bag of jerky."

Nars's eyes flickered from the wine to a nearby barrel of dried meat. "Why not?" he muttered, digging out a bag. "Stuff looks like leather, anyway." He considered throwing the bag at her, then realized he didn't want the wine to be lobbed at his head in retaliation. Instead he got up and dumped the bag of dried meat squarely on the line of demarcation.

"You sure it's beef?" she asked, wrinkling her nose at the lump.

"Never said it was."

Charlotte regarded the bag warily for a moment longer. Then, with a resigned shrug, she placed the bottle and corkscrew on the line, a few feet down from the jerky. Nars looked them over and nodded.

Locking eyes, they each darted out a hand and grabbed their respective items from the thin strip of no-man's-land. They continued watching each other until they both had retreated a safe distance.

"Right, then," Charlotte, said, ripping open the bag of jerky. "Bottoms up."

"Chow down." Nars uncorked the wine and took a probatory sip. "A little weird" had been too charitable a description; "a crime against grapes" was a better fit. But as much as he wanted to tell Charlotte so, he was too busy sputtering to form a sentence.

Across the room, Charlotte made a gagging sound. "Definitely not beef," she managed. "Leather would taste better."

"Yeah, well, the wine tastes like ass."

"You'd know."

"Your _mom_ would know."

A sullen silence descended.

When brooding lost its novelty, Nars decided that anything was better than being locked in a cellar and sober. And no mere alcohol was going to get the better of him. Fighting down his nausea, Nars tipped his head back, took a deep breath, and guzzled the wine. Charlotte watched curiously until he came up for air.

"I get it," she said, raising her own bottle as Nars resisted the urge to retch. "After we force enough of this down, everything else will taste better. Or we'll care less. Either's fine by me." Pinching her nose, she took a swig, then gave Nars a look of profound disgust. "Sweet gods, that's terrible."

"Worse than the jerky, huh?"

"_Nothing_ is worse than the jerky."

"Trade you another bag for another bottle."

"All right."

As Charlotte headed back into the shadows for more wine, Nars struggled through another gulp and prayed that intoxication would come quickly.

* * *

Marty was having a wonderful day. First, he'd been acquitted of multiple counts of petty larceny when the weapon merchant's wife had decided to replace the local religion, which also functioned as the local judicial system, with a near-identical one that used the word "people" a lot and overturned all of the priest's convictions in the spirit of _tabula rasa_. Apparently, _tabula rasa_ meant that Marty was now allowed to be near people's valuables without anyone acknowledging that he was trying to steal them.

His luck hadn't ended there, either. It seemed everyone in the town was hard at work building some sort of defense structure, which had probably begun as a wall before mutating into a semi-organic barricade. If anyone had bothered to consult Marty, he might have informed the townsfolk that while they had created something difficult to knock down, anyone with a build like Marty's had no trouble scrambling up and over it. But no one thought to ask, and Marty was too busy looting their unguarded houses to offer.

The only condition of his release from the priest's clutches was that he take an oath of loyalty to the People's Republic of Kazave. What the hell, he'd thought. Marty hadn't liked adventurers ever since he'd tried to register as a thief and discovered that the good folks at Dharma expected more than a penchant for taking other people's things. They'd expected talent, for a start, which Marty felt took all the fun out of it. There had also been some nonsense about disarming traps. Marty had pointed out that the average villager didn't need any traps to catch him, and this, for some reason, had failed to sway the priest in charge. A botched effort to steal a still-burning torch hadn't helped much, either.

Not that it mattered. Marty preferred to work freelance.

Humming to himself as he dragged his increasingly cumbersome sack of spoils to the next house, Marty stopped to wave to the innkeeper, who was grafting an old wheelbarrow on to the wall.

The innkeeper squinted at him for a moment, then said, "Why aren't you working with us?"

"Come, come, now," said Marty with his best condescending smile. "We can't _all_ be wall builders, can we?" He shrugged, accidentally dislodging his sack from his shoulder. An exciting potpourri of trinkets spilled over the ground.

"Hey!" roared the item store owner. "Those are my bunnytails!"

Marty recovered quickly. "Well, fancy that!" he said, trying to sweep them back into the sack with his foot. "I wonder how they got there?"

"I imagine you stole them," offered a young man who had paused in the act of nailing a washboard to the barricade.

Marty's face was, he hoped, the picture of injured innocence. "What makes you think that?"

The item store owner turned an aplopectic shade of red. "We all know you're a damnable little thief, that's what!"

"Doesn't count," Marty replied, grinning. "_Tabula rasa_, remember? Can't judge me on past deeds."

"But you're stealing the nails now," said the astute young man with the hammer.

Marty glanced down and found that his right hand was indeed engaged in stuffing several of them into his shirt pocket. His left hand, meanwhile, had mysteriously acquired a paintbrush.

"Well, you see," Marty began, glancing around for a quick exit, "the thing is, I, uh, actually... Look out! There's an oppression behind you!" 

The resulting confusion gave him just enough time to scoop up a handful of bunnytails, duck behind the tavern, and scramble up the village wall before anyone could catch up with him. Climbing down the other side proved more problematic, and he found himself skidding and sliding most of the way before crashing to the ground. On the bright side, he'd managed to snag a loose board and a flowerpot on his way.

After picking himself up and dusting himself off, Marty headed south for Romaly, whistling. He didn't recall having ever been arrested there.

* * *

"Sir?"

"Yes?"

"Would you mind not laughing quite so loudly when the patrons are injured? I'm afraid it makes them a bit nervous."

"Oh, I understand. Wouldn't want to accidentally give me a moment's enjoyment, would we? I'll just sit here and wallow, then."

"...Er, sir?"

"No, no, I'll be fine. Don't put yourself out on my account."

"Sir, you've put a cooking pot on your head."

"Precisely."

* * *

Evening fell, and construction of the People's Defensive Structure of Kazave was declared finished until an observant citizen pointed out that it had no gate. Discussion over where to put the gap ended when the innkeeper's wife demanded the return of her dresser, which had been integrated near the midpoint of the western wall. It was as good a place as any.

Reconstruction would have to wait until morning, though. The sun was already sinking behind the mountains, and not even the most dedicated supporter of the new republic wanted to work with large, potentially lethal components by darkness. The village smith had already had a nasty run-in with one of his own anvils.

As the workers prepared to go home for the night, Dora supervised from her perch atop the make-shift watchpost along the southern wall, smiling serenely. Periodically she waved her frying pan in a show of encouragement.

The innkeeper shoved the last of his spare wash basins into a gap in the wall before standing back and eyeing his work with satisfaction. "It's a proud new day for Kazave," he said aloud, on the grounds that a job well done deserved a platitude.

"Not yet, it's not," said his wife. "We can't have a proud day without my dresser. It's an heirloom, you know. Priceless. You can't find that level of workmanship anymore, especially not—"

Her tirade was cut short when Dora stood up on the rickety watchtower and yelled southward, "Who would enter the proletarian utopia of the People's Republic of Kazave?"

"...The hell?" replied a voice from the other side of the wall. Having encountered a lot of adventurers in their days, the villagers could classify this specimen already: burly, unshaven, almost certainly unwashed, good at hitting things until they stopped moving, poor at counting out how much money he owed, and even poorer at accepting mathematical aid. The townspeople crowded against the barricade in search of peep-holes.

"State your names and business," Dora called down, tapping her pan impatiently against her left palm. "And you'll have to go through immigration."

"...The hell?" repeated the adventurer.

The tavern owner nudged the woman next to him. "Do we even _have_ immigration?"

She shrugged. "Probably not until we have a gate, at least."

"Well, I don't know about all of _you_," said the innkeeper, shooting suspicious looks at everyone around him, "but _I'm_ clean, and I intend to stay that way, gate or no." His wife sighed.

From outside the barricade came the muted sounds of discussion, followed by a new voice shouting, "We demand that you let us in!" That would be the less stupid one, the mage who had a shaky command of one or two spells and who thought that this entitled him to an unlimited supply of wine, women, and second chances regarding his behavior around both. The Kazave method of identification was seldom wrong in these matters. "We're heroes!"

"Aha!" Dora pointed her frying pan down at the potential invaders. "A confession of ill intent!"

"...The hell?" came out again, followed by a more heated exchange outside the walls. The villagers strained to listen.

After a few seconds of buzzing voices, a third man decided to try his luck: "Let us in or we'll burn this thing down!" And that would be the dealer, the party's leech, speaking with extra bombast to draw attention away from his basic inability to contribute anything. The proper, settled merchants of Kazave held his type in particular contempt.

"Let's not be hasty!" yelled a fourth voice, whose owner had probably noticed that very little of the wall was flammable. "Surely we could all come to a mutally beneficial compromise!" The oily tone indicated that a Type Two cleric rounded out the traditional party size. He was the clever one, at least comparatively speaking, and had probably had his nose broken fewer times than his companions. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he would insist that the world as a whole was too naïve to suspect a cleric of having ulterior motives, and he would demand to be considered "ironic," or perhaps even "edgy."

Dora let out a barking laugh before dropping something white over the barricade. There was a long pause outside.

"'No adventurers on pain of eradication'?" said the cleric, who was no doubt the quickest reader. "Are you all out of your minds?" Another pause. "This is a dish towel!"

Beaming, Dora said, "It's also our flag. We the people have the down-to-earth knowledge needed to improvise using household goods. Now, are you going to withdraw from our lands, or do we have to eradicate you? Or at least imprison you, like the last two." She frowned, said, "Almost forgot about them," and then got back on track. "So which, illegal invaders of our republic, will you choose?"

There was a lot of talking outside the wall, over which the cleric shouted, "It's a gods-damned _dish towel_!"

"Load," said Dora.

Her tone was so calm that it took the villagers a moment to figure out that she'd given a command, but once realization set in, so did action. Half a ton of wood, metal, rope, and shaky construction rolled forward, coming to a stop near the wall. 

Earlier in the day, Dora had recruited a number of villagers to work on what she had described as the offensive counterpart to the People's Defensive Structure of Kazave. The result was the People's Catapult of Kazave, onto which pieces of the wall were now being loaded. The tavern owner claimed to have contributed most of the pieces for it, but the catapult was too visually chaotic to make identification of the componenets possible. The only obvious contributions were the item store owner's and the priest's; the wheels had "Kazave Potions, Herbs, and etc." stamped on them, and the catapult had been built and stored in the temple yard, to the priest's dismay.

Still staring down at the intruders, Dora said, "Aim."

"You haven't got anything in there!" said the dealer. "Ha!" His companions seemed to count the noises coming from inside the village as evidence to the contrary.

There was a tense pause as Dora climbed down from the watchtower.

"Fire!" she cried. "For the liberty and honor of the People's Republic of Kazave!"

To the surprise of most of the villagers, the payload of wood, metal, and stone cleared the wall and made an earth-shaking impact outside. There were a few relieved cheers.

When no further challenges were issued, Dora scampered back up to her post and peered into the distance. "The enemies of Kazave are fleeing," she reported. "Long live our glorious republic!"

"Can't blame 'em," said the tavern owner. "I'd run, too, if someone threw half an old shed at me."

"Don't forget about the anvil," added the woman beside him.

Dora returned to the ground and gave the assembled a satisfied nod. "We shall retrieve the pieces of the People's Defensive Structure of Kazave tomorrow when we create the People's Immigration Portal of Kazave," she said. "For now, let us celebrate our victory over the oppressors!"

The cheering throng followed her to the tavern, where the priest was already making a game attempt to blot out the last twenty-four hours.

"The godsh," he explained to the whiskey he'd found in the storeroom, "are not going t'be happy about thish. Not one bit." He paused. "And neither ish me. Ish I. Am I. Dammit."

* * *

"After all those sandwiches, I'm not sure I should cast magic."

"True. And it's getting late. We should stay in Romaly tonight."

"And maybe the next night, too. Just to be sure."

"Good thinking."


	2. Chapter 2

Sunrise found its way to Romaly at about the same time Marty did, but sunrise hadn't wasted all its money at the Pachisi Track on the way. Several early-risers were walking the city streets, among them a woman with a wheelbarrow full of fruit that was probably market-bound. Marty grinned at her as his right hand nicked an apple.

"What do you think you're doing?" she demanded, while at the same time he said, "I have the craziest story for you."

There was an awkward silence as the rules of conversation took offense. 

"Um, you go ahead," said the woman, blushing.

"No, no, you go first," Marty replied, using his left hand to pluck individual grapes from their bunch. Some bananas met with a similar fate at his right.

The woman's blush took on an angry violet cast. "You're stealing my produce!" she shrieked. "Thief! Help! Thief!"

A crowd began to form.

"I haven't got a clue what she's talking about," Marty said, blinking angelically. His effort to pocket the goods was spoiled when he fumbled the grapes and sent them scattering over the dirt road. "But that's all beside the point," he added quickly. "Thing is, that little village up north has gone nuts, and I, resident of almost a full year, including time spent unjustly incarcerated, am willing to give you the exclusive inside story for the low, low price of only five thousand gold, plus however many drinks I consume in the telling. How about it?"

There was an incredulous silence, broken by the owner of the fruitbarrow exclaiming, "He's picking the caps off my strawberries!"

"If by 'nuts' you mean 'under a sleeping curse,' that's old news," said an old man near the front of the multitude. He came close to losing his pocketwatch but managed to tug it back.

Marty snorted. "Oh, please. I'm not talking about Noaniels. I've talking about Kazave. Or, as they'd prefer me to say, the _People's Republic_ of Kazave."

"You're making that up," said a little boy. "I get in trouble when _I_ tell lies."

"Look, it's the gods' honest truth." Marty very nearly snatched a woman's necklace before being slapped away. "They locked a couple of adventurers in a cellar and built this crazy barricade out of all the junk they had just lying around. The wife of the guy who owns the weapon store is leading them. Out of her mind. Wears a bathrobe everywhere. And I can be talked down to four thousand if I get a free dinner."

The crowd rewarded Marty with a look of collective skepticism the likes of which he hadn't seen since he'd tried to give the guards of Edinbear a plausible reason for his presence in the castle courtyard with a sackful of royal silverware and half the princess's shoes.

"Someone should get the justices," said the old man in the front. As the call to action rippled back through the layers of citizen apathy, Marty tried to plan a daring escape involving the wheelbarrow. None of his ideas didn't also involve gravity turning itself off for a while.

Just as a few people in the back began to look motivated, the sounds of an armed and angry group of men filled the air, the prevailing sound being, "We demand to speak to the king!"

Enough of the crowd decided to investigate the newcomers for Marty to spot a way out of the circle. Never one to question a lucky break, he scurried off at top speed for the nearest alleyway. One of his hands connected with something along the way and managed to keep it, which brightened his mood considerably.

A shopping center loomed ahead. Deciding that this was even better than hiding on the street, Marty ducked inside, spotted a shadowy stairway leading down, blessed his luck, and darted in.

Panting, he took a moment in the stairwell to collect himself and see what he'd managed to steal. It turned out to be a sack lunch with a sandwich that, judging by its appearance, may or may not have been egg salad. When eating it failed to resolve the issue, Marty shrugged and headed downstairs. Wherever he was, he intended to stay until the good people of Romaly were less likely to recognize him.

* * *

"We demand to speak to the king!" bellowed a voice that no amount of hiding under the pillow could muffle. Quinn rose and stomped over to the window, clenching her staff in her fist. Code of Magical Ethics be damned; someone was going to feel the wrath of Bang.

Pushing the inn's tacky yellow curtains aside, she opened the window and squinted at the morning. A large crowd had gathered some distance away, centering on a party of four bedraggled-looking adventurers. The loud voice belonged to the one who looked like a dealer.

"There is treason!" he cried. "Treason in the north!"

Quinn wondered if Icebolt would be more likely to stay on target over the distance. Anyone who made that much noise before noon didn't deserve a warning shot.

Fortunately for her oaths of conduct, another, less shrill member of the group took over the talking. "It's Kazave," said a greasy-looking cleric. "The whole town's gone mad. They think they're some kind of republic now."

Quinn sighed. This did not bode well.

"And they've built some kind of barricade."

Not well at all.

"We think they've got hostages."

"And the fun follows us," Quinn muttered, slamming the window shut. "Hey, Xing, you'd better get up now."

By the time she had explained what was going on and arrived with him at the site of the disturbance, the direction of the conversation had taken a sharp turn.

"We're not joking!" snapped the party's mage."What's wrong with you people?"

An old man regarded him dubiously. "I think I speak for most of us," he said, "when I say that there's a better chance you five are pulling a prank than there is that some lunatic housewife has taken over Kazave."

The group's warrior looked at each of his companions, then at himself, and did some quick work with his fingers. "Five?" he said at last. "But there's only—" finger check— "four of us."

"Thank you, genius," said the cleric. "As you all can see, we are a party of four. To what 'five' are you referring... to? No, just referring. Anyway, who's 'five'?"

An angry woman standing next to a wheelbarrow full of fruit stamped her foot. "That stupid thief! The one who ruined my grapes!"

The cleric blinked. "Don't you mean _stole_ your grapes?"

Another woman shrugged and said, "He wasn't a very good thief. Which you should know, being in league with him and all."

"Lies and slander!" bellowed the dealer, just before the cleric backhanded him.

Xing drew Quinn aside.

"You want to call the justices on these guys and track down the thief, don't you?" he said. When she nodded, he added, "Good, because I think the justices are already here. Just wanted to make sure that we had the same plan." 

Quinn turned to see an enthusiastic little boy directing a number of armed, uniformed men to the oblivious adventurers. Four counts of resisting arrest later, the party was being led away in chains to the castle dungeons. The crowd began to disperse.

"Pardon me," said Quinn, standing on tip-toe to tap the shoulder of a man who looked eager to run off and tell someone what he'd seen, "but did you see what started all this?"

He looked down at her with a grin. "You bet I did! One of the first ones over! Man, that thief was a piece of work. Tried to sell us this wild story about Kazave, and the whole time he's grabbing at everything—"

"Yes," interrupted Quinn, "but what did he look like?"

"Eh, small. Red hair, I think." The man scratched his head. "I dunno. I was busy watching his hands fly everywhere."

Quinn nodded. "And did you happen to see where he went?"

"Nah, he just took off when—"

"Thanks." She walked back over to Xing, leaving her informant a little deflated. "Basically," she said, "we're looking for a redheaded kleptomaniac who's good at running away."

Xing crossed his arms thoughtfully. "This is a huge city. Where do people go around here to disappear?"

Not far from where they stood, a large wooden sign shaped like a downward-pointing arrow advertised "The Joy of Vice: Providing Adult-Oriented Entertainment since the Reign of King Julius the Less Inhibited. Always Discreet! Coins Not Redeemable for Gold." Someone had obviously had a struggle making all the words fit, as "gold" was just a blotch of yellow paint on the tip of the arrowhead.

Quinn indicated the sign with her thumb. "I've got a good guess."

* * *

"Charlotte?"

"Mmm?"

"I'm too plashtered t'see straight, and you _still_ aren't hot."

Glass shattered against the wall.

"Ha. Mished me."

"Needed shome shards for Infernos t'pick up."

"Y'wouldn't—ACK!"

* * *

The sound of metal being hit repeatedly against wood roused the innkeeper from his slumber. Blinking, he looked around and found that he'd passed out in the tavern, along with about two-thirds of the town's population. He also seemed to be missing his pants.

The People's Republic of Kazave needed to have victory parties more often, he decided. It also needed to wait until mid-afternoon before conducting official business the next day.

The banging sound moved closer, culminating with the tavern's door being flung open to admit an entirely too bright Dora, frying pan in hand, and an equally bright morning. The villagers who had not spent the night on the floor staggered in behind her, several of them struggling with socks or missed buttons. The tavern owner dragged himself up from behind the counter and made an inquisitive mumble.

Before anyone was coherent enough to ask questions, Dora had climbed up onto the counter and assumed a posture of authority. The quicker-thinking villagers covered their ears.

"Citizens of Kazave!" Dora boomed as the slower-thinking villagers winced, the innkeeper among them. "Yesterday was a mighty victory for the cause of the common man, and today we must continue our struggle to throw off the universal shackels of pseudo-heroic oppression. Today we must create the People's Immigration Portal of Kazave to allow the huddled masses of the unenlightened lands to gather and learn how to spread our glorious revolution to their own benighted nations. Citizens of Kazave, I ask you: Are we united?"

A ragged cheer went up from the assembled, if for no other reason than that no one had figured out a method of arguing with Dora.

She banged the frying pan against the wall for silence. "We have one more issue to discuss," she added, once those afflicted with the most severe hangovers had stopped groaning. "The thieving adventurers who were first apprehended in the perpetration of their nefarious deeds were imprisoned in the cellar of the People's Military Headquarters of Kazave, rather than being eradicated. What shall we do with them?"

"Are we united?" had been a simple question that didn't require any particular attention to the context. But "What shall we do with them?" assumed a high level of comprehension, retention, and analysis, and it came on the heels of a lot of morning-inappropriate words. The villagers gaped.

The innkeeper considered, then said, "We should make them find my pants."

"They're over here," said the tavern owner, holding up the lost garment from behind the bar.

"Oh. Never mind, then." The innkeeper paused in the act of retrieval. "What were we talking about?"

"Grievances?" said the item store owner hopefully.

The frying pan hit the wall again. "Very well, then," Dora said. "All of favor of tabling the issue until after the construction of the People's Immigration Portal of Kazave?"

"Aye!" said the innkeeper's wife. "I want my dresser back."

"All opposed?" When no one responded, Dora alit from the counter and said, "This meeting of the People's Republic of Kazave is adjourned. To work!"

Hopping into his pants as he followed the masses outside, the innkeeper hummed to himself and wondered when they'd get to have a battle again.

* * *

Quinn had never been interested in gambling. She felt that the odds were stacked too highly against her, and in any case she valued skill more highly than luck. The Joy of Vice tried to accommodate the non-gamblers with a high concentration of puff-puff girls, but they didn't interest Quinn, either. That left only the bar. Again Quinn was uninterested, and no self-respecting pit of sin was going to accommodate someone that far gone.

At least she had the comfort of knowing that Xing wasn't going to be having any fun, either. His order expressly forbade every element present in the Joy of Vice, right down to the weird grime that covered most of the surfaces. The establishment gave every indication of having been founded by someone who used the "Thou Shalt Avoid" page of the fighters' handbook as a checklist.

Quinn and Xing attempted to discuss strategy, realized they were too close to the fighting pit to be heard, and retreated to a quieter, yet strangely filthier, corner. "I'll look there," Xing said, indicating the roaring crowd around the pit.

"Then I'll get the bar." Quinn pointed to the smoke-filled area against the far wall. "We'll meet back here if we can't find anything."

In the short walk to her destination, Quinn saw that a lot that qualified as "anything," including three friendly stabbings and an obviously male belly dancer, but nothing that qualified as unusual for a place that called itself the Joy of Vice. As her eyes adjusted to the haze hovering over the bar, however, her luck changed.

"Bingo," she said under her breath.

Alone at the end of the counter was what appeared to be a humanoid manifestation of kinetic energy with a bright explosion of hair glued to the top of it. Sitting still was clearly a challenge for the man; his fingers tapped like a troupe of amateur dancers against the countertop, pausing only when one of his hands darted out to snatch an unattended object. After watching him eat half a bowl of peanuts with one hand while nicking the bartender's tip with the other, Quinn decided that, in this case, the right hand was only vaguely aware that the left one existed and didn't much care what it was up to. And vice-versa.

She tapped him on the shoulder and watched both hands scramble in unsynchronized surprise.

"You're the guy from Kazave," she said, not bothering to make it a question. "My partner and I want to hire you." She paused to slap his left hand, which had been trying to get her money pouch. The right was fumbling around the counter in search of someone else's drink.

"I'm freelanshe," he announced, as if that explained everything. That his voice wasn't unusually high-pitched or rapid came as a shock, but the amount of alcohol in his system might have been slowing his speech. It was definitely slurring it. "All doorsh're open t'me."

"Right," Quinn said, with all the patience she could muster. "And we would like to hire you on a one-time-only basis."

"Yeah?" Even the man's eyes refused to hold still, as if he suspected something exciting was about to happen in his peripheral vision. His focus landed on Quinn for the amount of time it took him to say, "Too bad. I'm freelanshe. M'own bosh. Ha!"

The verbal approach was not going to work. Shooting a vexed look at the thief, who was currently draining a mug of ale while pilfering all the complimentary toothpicks, Quinn made her way to where Xing was peering over a block of the gambler wall.

"Found him," she said, pulling him into a quieter area. "Knock him out and we'll drag him back to the inn." To Xing's look, she added, "He's no good drunk, and if we leave him here, someone's going to gut him before he has a chance to sober up." When she got no answer, Quinn crossed her arms. "No one's going to stop you. I'd be shocked if anyone even noticed."

Xing sighed and followed her toward the bar. "I trained under a noble fighter of Dharma," he said. "I was taught to meditate and keep my power under control, lest it control me. My master said that violence against my fellow man is never the only solution."

"Really?" said Quinn. "You never had a problem smacking Nars and Charlotte around."

"They're Nars and Charlotte. And that's still a far cry from kidnapping a refugee."

Quinn smirked. "Well, there's our 'refugee' now. We should probably save him."

The man in question had managed to snag a pair of bunny ears from one of the puff-puff girls, and his victim was winning the tug-of-war game to get them back. "You lousy little creep," she growled, "if you don't let go right this second, I'm gonna get my manager and—"

"We'll take him," Xing interrupted, grabbing the thief's wrist. The man howled and released his grip on the ears.

The girl made one last indignant sound before re-affixing her headband and strutting back to one of the tables.

"Hey!" the thief protested, trying to squirm out of Xing's grasp. "Whaddaya—" He collapsed forward as Xing landed a neat chop to the back of his neck.

Quinn nodded her approval. "Nice work. Sometimes you scare me."

"I recall that this was your idea," Xing said, slinging their captive over his shoulder. "Should we throw a hood over him?"

"I wouldn't bother," she replied. "No one will recognize him when he's holding still."

* * *

After an indeterminable period of unconsciousness, Nars awoke with a hangover and set to work trying to shut it up with more wine. Unfortunately, his blind fumblings turned up nothing but empty bottles, and he refused to beg Charlotte for more. Clearly the next step was to roll over and pass out again. Nars was in the process of putting his plan into action when something sharp bit into his arm.

Yelping, Nars opened his eyes and found that the floor was littered with broken glass, a piece of which had embedded itself in his elbow. He pulled it out with a curse.

How the shards had gotten there was a mystery. There were a few fuzzy memories of a shattered bottle and a drunken Infernos spell that didn't take, but Nars had learned to be suspicious of any memory insulated by so much alcohol.

"Hey, Charlotte," he called, wiping the blood off with his shirt, "did you really try to kill me last, er, uh, before? And what time is it?"

"If I'd really wanted to kill you," she snapped, "you'd be dead. And it's a little hard to tell what time it is when we're _stuck in a cellar_, you moron."

Looking up from his wound, Nars saw that she was sitting in a corner with her knees drawn up to her chin, scowling at the world in general and him in particular. "Maybe if you weren't such a lousy magic user," he said, "we wouldn't be stuck in a cellar in the first place."

"Funny," she returned, "I seem to recall that your being a jackass is what got us thrown in here."

"Was not."

"Was too."

"Yeah, well, I'm not talking to you anymore!"

"Ha! That means nothing, because _I'm_ not talking to _you_!"

The cellar experienced three minutes of peace.

"This sucks," Charlotte whined, getting up to pace across her half of the floor. "The wine sucks—"

"Ha! You admit it!"

"—the food sucks worse, and there's nothing to do!" She stamped her foot and gave Nars an expectant look. 

"We could make out," he said. "Oh, wait, I'm sober now. Never mind."

No sooner had he spoken than his stomach twisted, and when the nausea had passed, a ring of Charlottes surrounded him. A panicked punch connected his fist with nothing but air. Sputtering indignantly, Nars tried to find the right image to glare at. "What the hell—"

"It wears off eventually," said the Charlottes. "And don't act like you didn't deserve it."

"I didn't! You started it!"

When the Charlottes collectively failed to answer, Nars followed their gazes, despite that fact that he couldn't see more than five feet in any direction without encountering a cleric-shaped hallucination. "Well?" he said at last. "What is it?"

The Charlottes cocked their heads. "I think," they said, "that I may have figured out how to get out of here."

* * *

"We finished the gate. You should see it! We've got these—"

"That's nice, dear. Where's my dresser?"

"Dresser?"

"Yes, dresser. That big wooden thing you were supposed to get out of the wall."

"Oh. Does it look like it would be a good desk if you turned it over and put it on something?"

"...I never thought I'd say this, but my mother was completely right about you."

"Huh? Anyway, there's a meeting now. We'd better hurry."

"You go ahead, dear. I've got something to take care of first."

"Want to get a good look at the gate, eh?"

"Something like that."

* * *

In the course of his long and unsuccessful career, Marty had done his share of waking up in unusual places. Many of these had been jail cells, several had been alleyways, and one had been the cavern of a hobbit named Norud, an event for which Marty had refused to seek an explanation.

His current location was a bit of stumper. While his memory of a bar and a bouncer-shaped man suggested "alleyway," he seemed to be on top of a bed, which suggested he'd gotten himself to an inn. Then again, his hands were bound, which usually meant he'd been arrested. Norud was not even to be considered. 

Warily, Marty pried open his eyes and found that he was indeed on a bed, that his hands were indeed tied, and that there were no hobbits in sight. He breathed a sigh of relief. 

"Well, look who's up," said a sharp female voice that brought the relief to a screeching halt.

Working his legs to and over the edge of the bed, Marty managed to sit up and get a look at his captors. The voice presumably belonged to the diminutive girl wearing a mage's hat and robes, whose staff was pointed at him in a casually threatening manner. Beside her stood a bear-sized young man who gave every sign of being a fighter. Both Marty's hands itched to pull his braid.

There was something familiar about the pair, and a moment's squinting made the connection.

"You kidnapped me!" Marty shouted, wanting to leap to his feet to drive the point home but reluctant to do anything that might get him knocked out again. "Let me go!"

The mage sighed. "Well, there's gratitude for you," she said. "You should thank us for getting you out of there before the big guy in the executioner's mask figured out you were the one stealing his drinks."

So _that_ was where the ale had come from. The other events of the evening began to resolve themselves, and another connection clicked into place: "Hang on! I thought you were trying to hire me, not knock me senseless."

The fighter cracked his knuckles and said, "They weren't mutually exclusive. Now, are you ready to listen to our proposal?"

Realizing that he was at a disadvantage, Marty decided to accept defeat with all the bad grace he could muster. "This's unethical," he muttered.

"Says the thief." The mage returned his glare and continued, "We have traveling companions being held hostage in Kazave. We don't necessarily _want_ them back, but we're under obligation. You're going to get us into Kazave, help us retrieve our captive party members, and then get us back out again. And we'll pay you for it."

Still sulking, Marty said, "And if I won't?"

The fighter nodded towards the window. "We give you to Romaly. There's a party of four in the dungeons who'd love to meet you."

Marty glared again, even though it wasn't doing any practical good. "This's blackmail," he grumbled.

"Not since we're paying you." The mage pulled a money pouch out of her robes and jingled it tantalizingly. "How's ten thousand gold strike you?"

_Stay cool,_ said Marty's brain. _If we play our cards right, we'll get twenty thousand upfront and be halfway to Ashalam before these fools know what hit 'em._

"Are you kidding?" said Marty's mouth. "I'd do it for half that!" His brain slunk back into darkness and self-loathing.

The mage shrugged. "I'm sure you would. But your pay's going on our fearless leader's tab, and since I'm sure this was all his fault, he deserves to take a financial hit. Now, are you going to behave yourself, or do we have to keep your arms tied?"

"I'm behaving." What Marty hoped was more an angelic grin than an avaricious one spread across his face. "For ten thousand gold, I'll behave however the hell you want me to." His brain wept quietly.

"Keep it up and you're back in the ropes," the fighter muttered, his fingers flying as the ancient secrets of his order undid a confusion of knots. "There. If you steal anything, we'll deduct three times the value of it from your pay."

Marty nodded and sat on his hands.

Eyeing him warily, the mage said, "I'm Quinn. You can call him Xing. I'd shake your hand, but our brief acquaintice has taught me better." 

Financial dealings were not among Marty's strong points, but self-introductions were. "I am the inimitable Martin Nobbles," he announced, "freelance thief and charmingly persistant rogue. You may have the priviledge of calling me 'Marty.' My accomplishments included being arrested in every major castle west of Zipangu and at least half the towns. I've got a heart of gold, too."

"Good for you." Marty deflated a bit as the mage continued, "Anyway, I can get us to Kazave, so your responsibility is to find a way to get us inside and..." She trailed off into annoyed, narrow-eyed silence.

It occurred to Marty that she was probably upset with him. "What?"

"Would you stop that already?"

"Stop what?"

"Twitching." She made it sound like a hanging crime. "It's like every muscle in your body is going off at once."

Marty, who had learned more than once that it was a bad idea to upset a mage, grinned sheepishly and tried to focus on sitting still. It took him several seconds to notice that both feet were still tapping a merry rhythm against the floor.

Quinn raised her staff. "Never mind," she said. "I'll take care of it for you."

For a nasty second, Marty was certain that he was going to end up minus a limb. Then a light dizziness passed over him, and he saw with relief that all his parts were still in place. When he tried to crane his neck to make sure, however, he felt as if he'd been dipped in tar.

"Nice one," said Xing. "Now he's twitching at half his normal speed."

"Whaaat?" Marty's voice stretched out of his mouth like taffy. "Heeey!"

With a small sigh, Quinn waved her staff again. Marty's efforts to move were suddenly happening at a normal speed, and he nearly toppled off the bed.

"You got the same orientation at Ruida's, right?" she said, turning to Xing. "Remember how they told you you'd visit exotic places, meet interesting people, and earn fame and fortune with like-minded adventurers?"

"Well, here's one out of three." Xing's voice balanced on the edge between amusement and exasperation. "It's like a carriage wreck. I can't stop watching."

Marty looked at his hands and noticed that he'd grabbed a pillow in the process of righting himself and was now engaged in pulling the feathers out of it. He tossed it aside and tried to look victimized.

"Someday I'm going to found my own recruitment tavern," Quinn went on. "With competency testing. And negative reinforcement via Thordain."

Xing nodded. "And make sure you ban jesters. I had to share a room with one at Ruida's."

Sensing that the conversation was drifting away from him, Marty looked for another way to amuse himself. Temptation beckoned in the form of the clasp on Xing's braid, and Marty's right hand caved to it.

"Remember," said Xing, "fingers are a privilege, not a right." Marty's hand turned aside at the last second and grabbed a fistful of bedsheets.

Quinn crossed her arms. "So if you've got time to screw around, I take it you've already figured out how to get us into Kazave. Let's hear it."

There was a panicked moment as he realized that they'd expected him to be thinking. Foundering, Marty clung to the first relevant thought to pop into his mind: "I can climb the wall."

"That's nice," said Quinn. "But I have the upper-body strength of cooked pasta, and Xing may be too bulky to follow your path, so maybe you should try another plan, hmm?"

Maybe official, certified thieves got training in this area, but Marty had never had to consider sneaking around with a group of physically dissimilar people. After a quick rifling through his memories, he realized that his most pertinant information came from half a comedy sketch he'd watched in Ashalam while making drunken attempts to pick the other patrons' pockets. The details of the routine were fuzzy, of course, but if he left out the crossdressing bit, he could probably pass it off as a legitmate plan. A plot, even. 

His brain drew its metaphorical curtains, locked its metaphorical doors, and refused to come out again.

* * *

Not even the terrified screams of an electrified jester could lift Stanley's spirits. He'd spent the night sleeping in a corner near some shrubbery, and the first news he'd heard on waking had been that an extremely twitchy man had visited during the night, raving about the situation in Kazave and trying to barter a fistful of bunnytails for tickets. He'd been ejected from the building after being caught stealing bits of the decor, but his message had outlived his presence. 

And the message had not been a good one. Even allowing for exaggeration, Stanley figured that he would be lucky if only his house burned down. Kazave itself probably wasn't going to survive Dora's latest assault on reality.

Stanley sighed. Her quirks had been endearing when he married her. And Dora had been harmlessly eccentric for a long time, perhaps because their son, who now lived in Portoga and occasionally wrote long, dull letters about his work in the shipping industry, had kept her busy for the better part of two decades. Stanley wasn't quite certain what he'd expected Dora to do with herself after the boy was out on his own, but her constant talk of social injustices should have given him a clue. Dora's problem was that she didn't know how to slow down with age.

The fussy host who'd been hovering around Stanley since the previous afternoon was approaching. Sighing, Stanley stuck the pot back on his head.

"Sir," the host said, for approximately the thousandth time since Stanley's arrival, "while we appreciate your fine patronage, we also express concern that you have yet to return home—"

"I have no home," Stanley interrupted. "My wife's taken over Kazave."

The host's face flickered through surprise, sympathy, disapproval, pity, exasperation, and, curiously, indigestion, before settling on a neutral smile. "Surely sir does not intend to stay here until the local unpleasantness is resolved?"

"Oh, that's right." Stanley made the vocal slide into "morose." "Don't let me be a burden on you. Take away my one last joy—no, no, I don't mind, it simply doesn't do for me to mind, does it? At least, it doesn't do any good." The effect of his sinking down into his seat was undermined by the clang of the pot against the wooden chairback.

The host continued to hover. Holding out a handful of gold, Stanley added, "Here. Now I'm a paying customer. That's what you all want out of me, isn't it?" 

When the money failed to disappear, Stanley sighed and pulled the pot off his head. "You're throwing me out, aren't you?" 

"At the moment," replied the host, "we simply believe that it would be in sir's best interests to return home. 'Throwing you out,' as sir put it, is what happens when Bruno and Clete in the back room decide to help sir on his way."

Five minutes later Stanley was outside the building, cradling the pot containing all his remaining worldly goods, with no idea what to do next.

* * *

"Wait, _that's_ your big plan?"

"Yeah. The villagers aren't very bright."

"What, and you are?"

"I resent that. And if you'd just think about it—"

"Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize that we're paying you too much."

"Okay, see, now you're thinking too hard."

* * *

It had been quiet for a while, so Nars decided it was time to voice his opinion: "This is the stupidest idea you've ever had, and that's counting the time you tried using Antidote on a venom toad."

"That was _your_ idea, Nars."

"Was not. You made me think of it. Shut up."

The multiple Charlottes stuck out their tongues at him, in one of the most nightmarish moments of his young life. Nars had been on the receiving end of many Surround spells in his time as a hero errant, but those had all been cast by monsters. Somehow, a ring of carnivorous butterflies was less unnerving than a ring of Charlottes, especially when the Charlottes were starting to flicker and distort as the magic wore off. One at the edge of his peripheral vision looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain.

"And this is a great idea," the Charlottes added. "You just don't appreciate my genius."

"Genius uses a lot fewer corkscrews."

The Charlottes held up a series of barrel lids menacingly, expect for a meltier one who appeared to be levitating a puddle of mud. "Just hurry up and get this done," they snapped, "unless you want to keep waiting around for someone to save you."

"No one saves—"

"Right. We've been over that." The Charlotte cluster paused and extended a distressing number of palms. "And pass the jerky," they said. "This leg's wobbly."

* * *

The tavern currently housed the population of Kazave minus several, including the guard on duty as the People's Immigration Officer of Kazave, the current shift manning the People's Defensive Force of Kazave, and the innkeeper's wife, whose husband was no help in determinting her whereabouts. The meeting began without her.

"Today," Dora began after rapping the pan against the wall for attention, "is a proud day for our fine republic. Soon we shall serve as a haven for honest townsfolk, and the shining beacon of our great liberty will illuminate all the world with a holy proletariat glow!"

The villagers cheered. With any luck, that meant they'd get to fend off another invasion before the day was out.

Dora shuffled some papers around on the counter. "Now, then," she said, "we must decide how to feed and house the anticipated refugees before word gets around and we have a flood of the tired, hungry, and oppressed."

After much quibbling, it was decided to convert the cells beneath the temple into living quarters for the new arrivals until more permanent dwellings could be established. When the question was raised of where these new dwellings would go, several villagers pointed out the wall was easy enough to expand, which led to happy speculation as to how much land the republic could emcompass before the mountains became a problem. At key points, the priest could be heard wailing from the storeroom.

The innkeeper's wife arrived near the end of the discussion, looking sweaty but triumphant. No one asked.

"That settled," said Dora, pushing the papers aside, "we come to the question of what to do with the villains still polluting our fair republic." She waved the frying pan to indicate the crowd. "What are the people's suggestions?"

After a moment of consideration, a young man in the back raised his hand. "If we leave them down there long enough, they'll starve," he pointed out. "Technically that's eradication."

There were assorted nods until the innkeeper's wife said, "That's not very humane."

"Right," said the innkeeper, who felt he had a stake in agreeing with her.

"But if we open the cellar, they might get loose and kill us," said the tavern owner.

There was a thoughtful silence.

"We could set the cellar on fire," suggested the innkeeper's wife.

The assembled cheered. Everyone loved a good compromise.

An old man near the front raised a timid hand and said, "But isn't the cellar part of our military headquarters?" 

"Don't worry," replied Dora, beaming. "We'll be careful. But I think your show of patriotic fervor deserves a round of the People's Applause of Kazave."

There was enthusiastic clapping. The crowd was enjoying itself.

"And now," said Dora, rapping her frying pan against the wall for order, "let's move on to the issue of trade relations with governments that continue to uphold the mock-heroic system..."


	3. Chapter 3

The People's Immigration Portal of Kazave turned out to be a door-sized hole in the lower half of the wall, with the People's Catapult of Kazave parked so as to be visible to anyone who looked in. Just inside the gap were three mismatched table legs and a crate, beside which were a book, a quill pen, and a bottle of ink. Quinn wondered if it was meant to be art.

After Marty had made an unsuccessful attempt on her hat and scampered off to the north wall, she and Xing approached the portal.

"Halt!" An overwhelmingly round man wearing a collision of metal parts and carrying a spear in each hand clanked forward, pointing both his weapons at the intruders. "And who might _you_ be, then?"

"Travelers," Quinn replied, taking Xing's hand in what she hoped was an affectionate manner. "We're a young couple looking for a new start."

The guard squinted at her. "You look like _adventurers_ to me," he said, adopting a facial expression that he had obviously been saving for this occasion.

Quinn waited for Xing to say something, then sighed and shouldered the burden of speech herself. "No, not adventurers. Just honest townsfolk."

"Really? And what's in that sack, then?"

"Goods. My husband is a merchant." Quinn spotted a way to shift the weight of the conversation away from her. "Isn't that right, er, Honeylovebear?"

Xing shot her an annoyed look before saying, "Yes, Sweetiedearest, I'm definitely a merchant."

"And what d'you sell, then?" asked the guard, whose squint now looked painful. Without waiting for an answer, he speared the bag slung over Xing's shoulder and blinked as dry grass and straw drifted out of the hole.

"I sell packing materials," Xing said, perfectly deadpan.

The top of Quinn's staff poked out, damming the flow of dead plant matter.

"Magical packing materials," he amended.

"Revolutionary, really," added Quinn.

The squint moved closer, until part of the guard's helmet fell forward to obscure it. "And where might you be from, then?" came out a bit muffled.

"Ashalam," they said in unison, pleased to be back on the script.

"Ashalam, hmm?" There was a confused moment during which the guard tried to push his helmet back into place without letting go of either of his spears. "I've got family in Ashalam, you know. So if you're merchants, I suppose you know—"

"We'd only just moved there," Quinn said. "Before that, we lived in Lancel."

"Got family there, too," said the guard.

"But we didn't live there for long. We'd only just left Edinbear."

"Funny thing, I've got a sister who works in the royal kitchen."

"Soo?"

"No, she lives in Samanao."

"Soo the _town_."

"Right, of course. Got a cousin there."

Quinn decided to change tacks. "Actually, we're originally from Tedanki."

"Ah, my wife's aunt lives there, I believe."

"Not anymore, she doesn't." 

The guard digested the information for a moment, then said, "Oh. Well, I supposed you'd know, wouldn't you? Welcome to the People's Republic of Kazave, then. I'd record your information, but we haven't got a desk anymore." After giving them an awkward salute, the guard stood aside and waved them in with one of his spears.

For someone who had just profitted from another's stupidity, Quinn was terribly irritated by it. "How did these people manage to capture Nars and Charlotte?" she whispered after they'd passed the gate.

Xing shrugged. "You're overestimating our comrades in their absence. It's understandable."

"And why are we saving them, again?"

"Contractual obligation."

The two made an effort to look like a young couple in love, or at least a young couple not displeased to be in Kazave, until they managed to duck into a shadowy corner behind the temple only a few yards away from the barricade. Quinn retrieved her staff as a precaution.

After a few seconds, there was a skittering sound, then a loud thump as Marty failed to climb the rest of the way down the wall. He grinned up at them from where he'd landed on the grass.

"Is the high pain tolerance something you develop," asked Quinn, "or is it nature's congenital gift to the stupid?"

Marty ignored her. "Your friends are in the cellar under the weapon store," he said, folding himself into a sitting position. "Southwest corner of town. It's supposed to be some kind of headquarters, and the whole place's bound to be under high security. Lady Liberator herself lives there."

"You're trying to steal my shoes," Xing pointed out.

Without missing a beat, Marty stood and continued, "So you're going to have a hell of time getting in without some help. Half upfront, right?" He extended a hand, palm upward, and wiggled it impatiently. His other hand began a tug-of-war game with Quinn over her staff.

She came out the victor and clubbed him over the head with the spoils. "You get your money when we get our party members back," she said. "And at least wait until we're not looking before you try to steal anything else."

Xing plucked Marty up by his shirt collar, interrupting the thief's effort to stuff a handful of straw into his pockets. "Listen," said Xing, in the tone that even Nars tended to heed. "You are going to create a distraction for us while we sneak into the weapon store. You are also going to keep your hands to yourself if you want to keep them at all."

Marty let go of the sash he'd been in the process of removing from Xing's waist. "But I don't have _time_ to plan a distraction," he whined. "They're going to set it on fire _now_."

_Never assume,_ said the universe to Quinn, _that your day can't get any worse._ She sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Back up."

Marty squeaked as Xing tightened his grip. "While you two were taking your time with the guard, I was keeping an ear out on top of the wall because no one ever looks up anyway and help I can't breathe." Once Xing had given his shirt a little slack, he added, "Apparently they figured out that 'No adventurers on pain of eradication' applies to adventurers already in the town. It's still chafing."

Xing dropped him. After giving Marty a moment to complain about his treatment, Quinn waved her staff near his face and said, "I can cast the slowing spell again."

"Southwest, weapon shop, going to burn the place down because they're afraid to open the cellar door," Marty replied promptly. "This way."

* * *

"See?" said Nars. "_This_ is why I said it was stupid idea."

The Charlottes, all but one of whom were in various stages of morphologic dissolution, glared at him. "I never said it was a _quick_ way to get out. Now shut up and keep going."

Returning her look, Nars tried again to force an instrument designed to pierce cork to tunnel through solid wood. It was, unsurprisingly, not working very well.

Their escape plan, which sounded less plausible every time he thought about it, had been to build a stand out of barrels and assorted scraps and then stand atop it while drilling through the wooden ceiling with corkscrews. Charlotte was convinced that enclosing part of the floor with a lot of tiny, closely spaced holes would eventually cause the section to fall through and allow them to climb out. 

In a society that prized cork as a building material, it would have been a fine idea. But then no one would leave corkscrews or anything remotely sharp lying around, so, really, the point was invalid and Charlotte was still an idiot. Nars used the strength of his irritation to force the unhappy tool through another revolution.

* * *

Stanley's mood took another spectacular dive as he approached Kazave and saw the disaster of a barricade enclosing it. After taking a moment to reconsider running to Romaly, catching the first ship to Portoga, and indefinitely inconveniencing his son, he sighed and kept walking. Really, why miss seeing a good catastrophe up close?

Shoulders stooped, he shambled halfway around the wall before finding the western entrance, which was guarded by what appeared to be his old store's entire surplus rack.

"Halt!" said the jumble of metal, and the voice rang familiar. "And who might _you_ be, then?"

Stanley drew close enough to confirm his suspicion. "Phil, it's me," he replied, enunciating in order to increase his odds of getting through what he knew to be a thick skull. "Stanley. Your neighbor of several decades."

The skull was a mighty fortress. "Might you be wanting passage into the People's Republic of Kazave, then?"

"Are you even listening to me?" When the question failed to produce a response, Stanley sighed and added, "Look, you know who I am. You borrowed my wheelbarrow six months ago and still haven't returned it."

"Ha! Do you expect me to believe that?" Phil brandished a pair of spears. "I'll bet you're a spy sent by the, er, what was it, mock-heroic oppressors!"

"Oh, for the gods' sakes," Stanley muttered. "I see how it is. I'm gone for a day, and already I'm thrown out of my own home. But let's not worry about Stanley. He won't mind, will he? Stanley the Universal Doormat never minds anything." 

There was an uncomfortable pause until Phil rallied, drawing himself up in an effort to menace. "Your efforts to confuse the People's Immigration Officer of Kazave will not go un—"

More than a hundred pounds of mismatched metal parts crashed to the ground, victims of a poor balancing decision. Stanley stepped over the prone figure and nudged the helmet with his toe.

"You can't get up, can you?"

"Your nefarious infiltration will never succeed!" replied Phil's muffled voice.

Stanley gave him a thoughtful look. "My, my, is this luck? I don't think I've seen it act on my behalf in _years_."

* * *

"But what if it's booby-trapped?" Marty persisted. 

"Either be a proper thief for once," said Quinn, "or less of a booby." She raised her arm to signal Xing, then paused and added, "You're clear on the plan, right?"

After a heated and profoundly unpleasant debate, two-thirds of the temporary party had decided to send Marty in through the chimney and get him to unlock the back door. Marty was opposed to this on the grounds that the sort of people who built a city wall out of farming implements were probably the sort of people who left bizarre death-traps lying around. Sympathy had not been forthcoming.

Marty tried again: "What if they set it on fire while I'm in there?" 

"Get this done fast enough and that won't be a problem." When he tried to protest, Quinn sighed and said, "Look, if they try to torch the place before we're in, I'll set off a Bang spell or something to buy you some time. Now will you quit stalling?"

"Don't see why I'm going in alone," he muttered.

Xing gave an impatient snort. "I wouldn't fit down the chimney, and Quinn has to stay out here in case the villagers arrive before you do your job. Which is getting more and more likely."

Before Marty could develop another argument, Xing had grabbed him and sent him airborne. After a horrifying moment of empathy for javelins, Marty found himself skidding painfully across the roof until friction brought him to a halt in front of the chimney.

Marty pushed himself up and glared down at his employers. When he sneaked a glance at the distance between his new perch and the top of the barricade, Quinn hissed up at him, "Ten thousand gold pieces!"

Marty's survival instinct didn't even try to override his greed. In a matter of seconds he had swung his legs over the edge of the chimney and begun to contemplate how to slide down. If he braced himself and took it slowly, he decided, he probably wouldn't end up crash-landing in the fireplace.

It was a fine plan until somewhere near the bottom, when he thought he heard fiery death approaching and dropped in a panic into the ashes. The distance wasn't enough to do any real damage, but he considered asking for a raise, anyway. Before he could enjoy the prospect of increased hypothetical wealth, the sound that had startled him in the first place came again. 

Whatever it was, it wasn't the sound of something burning. If Marty strained his ears, he got the impression of wood being scraped.

"Not taking me in that easy," he said, climbing out of the fireplace and making a perfunctory attempt to dust himself off. As he did, he glanced around the room and saw that he was in what would have passed for a perfectly ordinary kitchen if not for the pile of metal and wood on the floor. The scraping sounds seemed to be coming from underneath it.

Marty had been on the business ends of more traps than he cared to remember, and he was puzzled by how this one was supposed to work. As he circled the mass of metal warily, his hands helped themselves to a salt shaker and three decorative saucers from the counters.

"What the hell were you thinking?" demanded a muffled voice.

Starting with enough force to send his prizes to a shattering end against the wall, Marty took a few seconds to work his way from the captives being trapped in a cellar to cellars often being in kitchens to the voice belonging to an adventurer and not a vengeful saucer ghost. "Hello?" he called down at his feet.

There was a silence, followed by two frantically overlapping voices. Satisfied, Marty strolled out of the kitchen and set to work looking for the back door, snagging an apple on the way.

* * *

Although a specific few had been elected to handle the problem of burning out the cellar, the entire village minus the People's Immigration Officer and the priest had come along to watch. The catapult team had brought their own solution along, just in case.

"Citizens of Kazave," began Dora, as the assembled formed a semi-circle around the front of the weapon store, "we are gathered here today to—"

"Dear, what the hell do you think you're doing?"

All heads turned to the source of the voice, which turned out to be an unusually expressive Stanley. He was cradling an iron pot in one arm and using his free hand to point at the blazing torch being held by the innkeeper.

For a moment, Dora appeared taken aback, but she recovered quickly. "Citizens of Kazave," she said, "let us rejoice, for our lost—"

"I was certainly not lost," Stanley interrupted, "and it looks like you're trying to burn our house down. Why?"

Dora folded her arms across her chest. "It's not just a house—it's our military headquarters. And we're not burning it down. We're burning the adventurers out of the cellar."

Stanley dropped the pot on the ground and balled his hands into fists. "Are you completely out of your mind?"

The villagers were entranced. Dora snapped on a biweekly basis, but they'd never seen Stanley do anything more exciting than despair. The tavern owner started a betting pool near the catapult.

Dora's eyes narrowed. "Are you insulting the great and glorious People's Republic of Kazave?"

"This isn't a republic!" Stanley pointed furiously at the torch, the catapult, and the wall before throwing his hands over his head. "Look at all this! It's absolute lunacy!"

The innkeeper's wife nudged the man beside her. "I've never heard him shout before. What if he starts biting people?"

The man nodded toward the tavern keeper and said, "Thirteen-to-one odds. Me, I put my money on crying."

Dora pointed the frying pan at her husband, her knuckles white. "You have no idea what this is!" she shot back. "You ran away like—like some kind of _adventurer_ at the moment of our noble utopia's inception! Where were _you_ at the Battle of Liberty's Defense?"

By this point, the villagers had learned to hear capitalization in Dora's voice, and they cheered at the birth of a slogan. Now they could make posters.

"Dora..." Stanley's voice dropped a number of decibels, and the villagers with money on "non-stop screaming fit" cursed quietly. "Dear, you are about to murder two teenagers and probably destroy our home in the process. How in the name of any god you please is this a good idea?"

The frying pan wavered. "You left."

"Yes, and I think I took Kazave's collective store of sanity with me."

That had been entirely the wrong thing to say. In less than a minute, the shouting match had resumed in earnest, the gamblers had gone wild, and no one noticed the sound of a door opening but the innkeeper, who was too busy pretending his torch was a magic sword to care.

* * *

"Took you long enough." Scowling, Quinn brushed past Marty, who clinked, jingled, and squeaked with every motion, and added, "So how much time did you waste filling your pockets instead of looking for the door?"

Marty recaptured a runaway hand-mirror and gave her a hurt look. "What, you think I can't do two things at once?"

"Never mind that," Xing said, closing the door behind him. "Where's the cellar?"

"In the kitchen." Marty started off down the hallway, hands grabbing frantically at the trinkets escaping his overstuffed pockets with every step. "They sounded pretty crazy down there, too."

Quinn resisted the urge to beat him over the head with her staff. "And you didn't let them out _why_?"

Instead of answering, Marty directed her to attention to the doorway in front of him. Through it, she could see a sink, a stove, and a small mountain of armor and furniture rising from the center of the floor.

"Oh, of course," Quinn muttered as Xing began to dismantle the mound. "Gods forbid this should be straightforward."

"Quinn?" came Nars's half-muted voice from below. Despite everything, Quinn couldn't make herself describe the sound as welcome. "Hey, Quinn, is that you up there? Get me out!"

"Get me out first!" said Charlotte's voice. "And where the hell have you been?"

Xing glanced over at Quinn after tossing a suit of iron armor aside. "It's not too late," he mouthed.

"Don't tempt me," she whispered back, beginning to pull the lighter objects off the pile. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Quinn watched Marty rifle through the cabinets and collect handfuls of spices, sponges, and on one baffling occasion, old cheese. He was starting to untie the curtains when Xing sent a chair flying at his head.

"Hey!" Marty said indignantly, lurching to the right just in time to avoid the projectile. A shelf of plates suffered in his stead. "What was that for?"

"You're not helping," said Xing. "If the house catches fire before we get the cellar open, we're leaving you in here to handle things."

"Don't you dare!" yelled Charlotte's voice.

Giving them a look that was probably meant to convey his assurance that this was a bluff and that he was helping entirely out of the goodness of his twitchy little heart, Marty plucked a helmet from the pile. It ended up on his head, and he gave an appraising look to the stool he extracted next. Quinn tried to center herself and find a happy place.

"I've got it from here," Xing said. Once Quinn and Marty had stepped back, he strained and pushed until the remainder of the blockade was clear of the cellar entrance. A subsequent thump and curse from below indicated that one of the captives hadn't wanted to wait until the door was unlocked. 

Allowing herself a little smirk, Quinn slid back the deadbolt, flipped open the door, and was greeted by the sight of Nars and Charlotte engaged in a bitter catfight for the right to climb out first. Behind them, an odd construction of barrels was visible in the torchilit gloom. Quinn knew better than to ask about it.

Marty peered over her shoulder, prompting her to put a protective hand on her hat. "Thought we were in a hurry," he said, giving her a reproachful look.

"We are," she snapped, then cupped her hands around her mouth and said, "Would you two quit screwing around before the house burns down?"

"Before _what_?" yelped Charlotte. Her distraction caused her to let go of Nars's hair at a crucial moment in his struggle, and his elbow, in a horribly drawn-out motion, connected with the cellar's only torch and sent it flying into the stack of barrels.

It would be a hot day in Greenlad before Quinn thanked the gods for anything again.

* * *

The tavern owner nodded and made a note on his list. "So you're putting down two hundred gold on 'the frying pan is used as a weapon' at four-to-one odds, right? Let's have it."

As the young hopeful counted out her coins, someone tapped the tavern owner on the shoulder. He turned to find the innkeeper holding the still-burning torch in his mouth.

"I'm a dragon," he explained after transferring the blazing stick to his hand. "Grr. Rar. Burning."

His wife came up behind him and deftly took possession of his toy. "That's nice, dear. Why don't you go watch the fight for a while?" Once he'd run off to join the gawkers, she leaned over to inspect the table of probabilities and said, "You can remove 'military headquarters burns down.' I'm going to go put this thing out for now."

"Shh," hissed the tavern owner, presenting the sheet to the old man who was next in line. "If you don't go and announce it to everybody, someone's bound to bet on it."

The innkeeper's wife sniffed disapprovingly. 

In the near distance, Dora and Stanley's cataloguing of each other's faults reached a shriller pitch. To the tavern owner's relief, the innkeeper's wife abandoned her impending lecture and tried to get a better view of the squabble.

"I swear Lilah's getting to be the size of a bruin," she muttered. "If she's going to let herself go like that, couldn't she at least stand out of everybody's way?"

In the midst of another transaction (five hundred gold, house burning down, sucker), a vague sense of unease began to intrude on the tavern owner's consciousness. He glanced upward to see the flames of the torch flickering just high enough to catch one of the ropes on the catapult. Despite not having worked on the actual construction of the thing, the tavern owner suspected that the now-burning rope was also the Rope of No Return.

He considered tackling the innkeeper's wife, then decided the damage was already done and he'd be better off claiming ignorance later. Whistling innocently, the tavern owner swept the gold into the pot and made another entry on his list.

* * *

Nars would have had the upper hand if he hadn't still been stunned by his head's collision with the locked trapdoor. It would have helped if the dripping Charlotte clones had finished disappearing, too. So considering how the odds had been stacked against him, he felt fully justified in using Charlotte's panic at the sight of the burning barrels to scramble up the ladder.

As soon as he'd made the climb to sweet, sweet freedom, Xing lifted him up by his shirt and boxed his ears. 

"What the hell was that for?" Nars howled, struggling to get loose. Xing dropped him unapologetically to the floor.

"I can't believe you have to ask," Quinn said, brushing past him to lean over the cellar entrance. "Charlotte, hurry up and get—"

Charlotte and her blurred trail of selves shot up and out of both the cellar and Xing's range. "Take that!" she cried, pointing back in the direction she'd come.

There was a moment of total chaos in which everyone, including Charlotte and an unidentified man with a handful of silverware, dove out of the way of the slicing winds. A surprising number of items flew out of the man's pockets and crashed into the walls. As the roar of the spell died down, a monstrous tongue of flame licked up out of the cellar.

Nars would have sprung at Charlotte if Xing hadn't been in the way. "You know what?" he yelled at her from across the rapidly heating room. "The corkscrew thing wasn't the stupidest idea you've ever had, because _that_ just topped everything that any idiot in all of human history has ever even thought about doing!"

Charlotte and her mutated echoes made a rude gesture with varying degrees of effectiveness. "Then _you_ fix it, you idiot!"

"Neither of you is fixing anything," Xing said in his irritating "I Studied under a Bald Man with a Funny Name, So I'm Better Than You" voice. "We're getting out of here. Quinn?"

Nars and Charlotte attached themselves firmly to her arms, while Xing gave them an annoyed look and put a hand on her shoulder. The strange man reached for her hat, was slapped away, and grabbed ahold of her sleeve instead.

"Right," said Quinn. She flicked her staff, and Nars's stomach lurched as the world became a bright and turbulent place.

When his motion sickness abated, Nars found himself sprawled in the grass a good distance away from what he assumed was the backdoor of the house. Some sort of bizarre wall rose up before him, but there was a more pressing issue at hand.

Nudging Quinn, who was picking herself up to his left, Nars pointed at the stranger and whispered, "Who's that?"

"You owe him ten thousand gold pieces," she replied, "and don't ask about it now."

"Why the _hell_—"

"Not now." Turning to the rest of the group, Quinn said, "Give me a minute to rest and I'll Return us to somewhere less hostile. Outside takes a lot out of me."

Charlotte turned to the barricade and snorted. "We could just walk out of here if that thing weren't in the way." Then the terrible light of creativity filled her eyes, and she raised her arms for less than a second before Xing forced them back down.

"Learn from your mistakes," he said.

Nars was crafting a beautiful insult to add to that when he remembered something more important. "So while we're waiting," he hissed to Quinn, "you can tell me what the—"

There was a whooshing noise, followed by a tremendous crash as the house collapsed behind them.

After a pause, the loathsome creature who wanted Nars's money said, "I'm going to run away now. Pay me?"

* * *

Somewhere behind Stanley, there were a few screams, a lot of arguments over the phrasings of probabilities, and, for all he knew, an entire pantheon pointing and laughing at him. He wasn't going to turn around to check, though, because the settling ruins of what had formerly been his home and business had a special way of holding his attention. 

"She built a catapult," he said, to see if the words made any more sense out loud. "She built a catapult and loaded it and put it next to our house, and this has to be a dream because people just don't do that." He paused. "Unless they're doing it to me."

There was no response, which was unsurprising given that none of the villagers had dared to approach him. Stanley supposed they were waiting for him to kill someone first. But if the townsfolk were expecting another outburst, it was only because they hadn't noticed that Stanley's metaphorical spine had gone the way of his home's much less metaphorical central support beams.

If Dora intended to say anything, she hadn't gotten up the nerve to yet. Or, if Stanley let himself be a little more cynical, she was racking her brain for a way to put a positive spin on the situation. "Fresh new start" would be sure to figure into it.

As he continued to stare at the ruins, Stanley glimpsed a group of human figures scurrying towards the town entrance. Their jerky movements suggested a botched effort at stealth and a poor understanding of teamwork, and their survival completely failed to lift Stanley's spirits.

A flicker of motion drew his eye back to the wreckage itself. From deep within the devestation came a faint crackling sound, followed by a burst of flame. In seconds it had blazed into a bonfire.

"Yes!" exulted a man in the crowd. "That's eight thousand gold pieces!"

As the tavern owner attempted to engage him in a debate over what "burning down" constituted, several of the more alert villagers seemed to realize that a fire that large would spread. An ineffectual bucket chain was organized from the town's lake.

"I knew it." Stanley sighed and turned away from the fire. "I've been saying all along, 'There's no way my house isn't going to end up in ashes after this.' There were witnesses, too. You can ask anyone at the Pachisi Track."

Sensing that no one would pay him any mind now that he wasn't threatening violence, Stanley picked up his iron pot and poked at the contents as if expecting them to devise a brillant plan that would keep him from having to move in with his son. A future with nothing to look forward to but daily updates on Portoga's exports was not a future he was ready to face.

A hesitant tap registered on his shoulder. Turning, he came face-to-face with Dora, who looked almost sheepish.

"That wasn't supposed to happen," she said, and it was the closest thing to an apology Stanley expected to get. "But the spirit of the people is organizing—"

Stanley's temper rallied, but it slumped along with his shoulders before anything came of it. Instead he cut Dora off by saying, "Dear, we don't have a home anymore. We are homeless. Unless the people are finding a new home for us, I don't care what they're doing. We should just leave."

Dora gave him a blank look. "'We'?"

"We've been in Kazave for a long time. Maybe we should try a lower-stress environment."

"'We'?" Dora repeated.

Since tact had ceased to be concern around the time that he first saw the catapult, Stanley decided to be blunt. "After twenty-eight years of being married to you, I don't function well on my own. So it's either you or our son, and I don't hate myself enough to live in Portoga."

Dora gave him an appraising look before saying, "Twenty-seven."

"No, twenty-eight. I was eighteen."

"Twenty-seven. Robert's twenty-five now."

"He's twenty-six."

"I'm his mother. He's twenty-five."

"I read his last letter. He's twenty-six." Stanley pointed at the fire, to which the bucket chain was currently losing. "Unfortunately, the proof is no longer with us."

For a moment he expected Dora to point out that lost evidence didn't count, but she only pursed her lips. "How time flies," she said at last. "Well, the message of liberation should be spread..."

Before she could decide to spread it to somewhere like Elvenham or Tedanki, Stanley blurted, "You know, I've heard Soo has fewer adventurers per capita than any other town in the world."

Dora tapped her fingers against her frying pan as Stanley wondered if the peace and quiet would be worth the near-total isolation and infamous dialect of Soo. "A land in which the mock-heroic regime has yet to take root might resist its tyranny entirely," she mused aloud, and Stanley realized that he was doomed to lifetime of linguistic contortions regardless of where he went. "But how would we arrive at this immaculate oasis?"

"Portoga sends a ship there every now and then," he replied. "We could wait in Romaly, but we should at least visit Robert long enough to hear him say that he is, in fact, twenty—"

A panicked cry from behind drew his attention. Stanley turned just in time to see the lake erupt like a geyser, its water flying high and far enough to create a translucent umbrella between him and the sky. "Ooh," said a admiring voice from somewhere in the crowd. 

Then the moment passed, and a thick sheet of water landed on Stanley's head. That it also landed on the remains of his home and quenched the flames was a cold comfort.

Dora wrung out one sleeve of her bathrobe, watched water from the rest of the garment seep into it, and set her chin. "We'll dry out on the way," she said.

"But—"

Shaking her head, Dora waved her frying pan at the drenched pile of splinters and ashes. "We have no spare clothing now that the mock-heroic menace has dealt a grievous blow to the dwelling-place of liberty."

Stanley knew he wouldn't win this one, but he felt compelled to try. "Dear, evil political forces did not destroy our house. Your catapult did."

"A catapult clearly corrupted by—"

"Never mind." Stanley's will to opine was fading fast. "We can buy new clothes in Romaly after we salvage the rest of my wares from Phil and this... thing you've built."

Dora gave him the sort of look generally reserved for people who use "cheap labor" to refer to their own children. "The People's Defensive Structure of Kazave," she said emphatically, "is a cooperative construction that keeps the oppression out."

"You just keep telling yourself that, dear."

* * *

"I can't _believe_ you wasted your magic like that," Nars said for what was, by Quinn's count, the seventeenth time. Pointing out the ethical problems with letting the fire rage hadn't shut him up, and she doubted mentioning that the blaze had been his fault in the first place would help, either. Instead she made a mental note to ask Xing about meditation techniques. Deep breaths weren't doing the trick.

"And you haven't paid me yet," said Marty in a tone that suggested this was a helpful reminder and not something he'd been repeating every sixty seconds since the house collapsed. Fortunately, Nars was too busy whining about having to walk back to Romaly to start a fistfight.

Then again, "fortunately" was a strong word. "I can't _believe_—" Nars began before Quinn rounded on him.

"Have you ever seen a Return spell go wrong?" she asked. When he shook his head, she gave him a dark smile. "Pieces of you end up everywhere. Sometimes there's a shower of body parts where you wanted to go, and sometimes you send a chunk of yourself to every town you've ever visited. Either way, if I used Return now, you'd probably end up dismembered. In fact, I can promise you that you would."

Nars blinked, then said, "Cool! Try it on Charlotte!" 

By the time they'd bickered their way to the Immigration Portal, Quinn was looking forward to the marauding monsters that they were sure to meet on the way back. Something needed to die. Painfully.

Xing raised a hand to halt the group. "I'll take care of the guard," he whispered, slipping around the corner. A long silence followed, broken at last by Xing's voice: "Never mind. Come on."

The heavily armored guard lay sprawled outside the entrance, wriggling in a futile attempt to get his face out of the grass.

Before anyone could comment, Marty began raiding the area where the desk should have been. Quinn had no intention of asking what the appeal of inkwells and quill pens was.

"That's my new spear!" Charlotte exclaimed, wresting the weapon from the prone figure's hand. "Wow, what were the odds of _that_?"

The guard began a muffled but unmistakably rude monologue.

Nars joined her. "Hey, and that other one's _my_ spear! Pretty convenient, eh? I think that's my new shield strapped to his back, too."

As the looting continued in earnest, Quinn gave Xing a long-suffering look and said, "Mages get blacklisted for breaking contract, but maybe you can still get out of this."

"I'm afraid not," he replied. "Fighters get blacklisted, too, and they threaten us with spiritual torment in the hereafter."

"Ah. Mages save that for those of us who kill our teammates."

"Is that a common problem?"

"Short tempers and BeDragon are a volatile mix."

A rustling alerted her to Marty's effort to capture her money pouch from behind. With a sigh, she swung her staff over her shoulder and heard the satisfying thump of wood against a skull. "If you want to steal something," she said, turning to face him, "try the guard. He can't fight back."

"Already did," Marty replied, and the state of his pockets testified to this. "Got the boy's pouch, too, and if there's ten thousand gold in there, then I'm the queen of Isis."

Quinn stared at him. "Wait. You robbed someone who was conscious and capacitated?" As the rest of the sentence sank in, she added, "I'm going to hate you forever for that image."

"He robbed Nars," Xing reminded her. "And he's only a wig and some padding away."

"You're not helping."

Marty's fingers tapped impatiently against the barricade, occasionally coming away with loose bits of it. "Point is," he said, "I'm short four thousand gold, and I want to know what you intend to do about it."

Quinn shrugged. "Rob Charlotte."

"Already did. I was counting it as a bonus."

Taking a deep, calming breath, Quinn resisted the urge to set his hair on fire. "In that case," she said, employing the tone she normally reserved for slow children and royalty, "you've already got your money, haven't you?"

Marty scowled. "Don't see why that should count."

Before Quinn could argue, Xing flexed and said, "Not to change the subject, but when I was still in training, I accidentally shattered another student's kneecap. Did you know kneecaps can shatter?"

Marty's gaze shot from Xing to Quinn to his own legs. "You wouldn't," he said, but after a beat he added, "Thing is, I've decided to give you a discount in hopes of encouraging, er, puppies. And only a sick bastard doesn't like puppies." 

"Not one of your better ones," said Quinn.

"Point for effort, at least?"

Before the conversion could degrade further, Nars and Charlotte, now fully if eclectically armed, made their way over. "Done now," Nars announced. "Let's go."

Quinn nodded. "This is the first and will probably remain the only time you've taken the words out of my mouth." Turning to Marty, she was about to imply that his life would be better if he didn't follow them south when he beat her to it.

"Well, I'm off to Noaniels, then," he said with a dramatic flourish that rewarded him with some of Charlotte's plunder. "Good area for thieves, I hear. Lots of unconscious people not guarding their valuables."

Nars's eyes lit up, so Quinn snapped, "Romaly. Inn. Now." 

"Wait a minute." Nars narrowed his eyes. "Wasn't he trying to get money out of me a minute ago?"

"He's been paid," Quinn said.

Glowering at her, Marty went for a last hurrah. "I still think—"

"_He's been paid_."

"But—"

Xing cracked his knuckles.

"Actually, never mind."

There was an awkward moment.

"If you're waiting for us to invite you into the party," said Quinn, "don't."

Marty shook his head gallantly as his right hand made an unsuccessful grab for Charlotte's spear. "No, no, I couldn't possibility," he said, bowing as he ducked her retaliatory effort to skewer him. "I've got to live on the open road, you know. Wild hearts and all that."

"Where the hell's my shield?" asked Nars.

Quinn neglected to mention the obvious, and after a final spastic salute, Marty sauntered off with an unusual contour to the front of his shirt.

Xing nodded after him as his silhouette diminished in the distance. "And that's that," he said. "Thank the gods."

There was a long silence, until Charlotte asked, "Does anyone remember where we were going in the first place?"

* * *

Once the crashing, roaring, and curiously wet-sounding explosion had convinced the priest that the judgment of the gods was finally upon Kazave, he rose shakily to his feet, took a step towards the door, and collapsed into intoxicated unconsciousness.

When he woke the sounds had stopped, but the priest still staggered out of the storeroom and tavern with as much dignity as his current state would allow him. What he found outside perplexed him. Instead of the glorious miniature armageddon he'd been expecting, all he saw were the distant remains of the weapon store, the accursed catapult, and a lot of soaked villagers.

Dora was nowhere in sight. Perhaps it had been a very specific apocalypse.

Brushing the cobwebs from his robe, the priest made his way to the southwestern end of the village and leaned against the inn to catch his breath. Now that this whole "republic" mess had blown over, all he had to do was deliver a little divine message and watch the people scurry back to their proper village lives.

"We should probably take the wall down." 

The priest started, then let his gaze wander until it landed on the tavern owner, who was dripping nearby and still speaking: "I mean, it doesn't feel right without her yelling things over it, and I want those stools back."

"What if someone attacks again?" asked an old woman. "I can't cane 'em all myself."

The tavern owner wandered over to the catapult with the air of someone who had decided to be an expert. After poking it in a few places, he turned and announced, "It'll be fine with a new rope. So we'll just launch a wheelbarrow at anyone who attacks."

Before the priest could express the gods' condemnation of that idea, the people had broken into a cheer. Clearly the contraption had seduced their simple provincial souls.

Clearing his throat, the priest lurched as regally as possible into the people's midst and raised his arms. "Disciples of Divinity, how you have fallen! The judgment of heaven has been upon us this day, but in their mercy the gods have spared your lives, that you might yet repent of your folly!"

The innkeeper raised his hand. "Not bad, but it's not quite the same. Try pointing at things and saying 'the people' more."

Ignoring him, the priest continued, "Would you squander your last chance at redemption? Return now to the path of the gods, or suffer the same fate as the temptress who built this mechanical abomination!"

The item store owner gave him a critical look. "What, you mean we'll all decide to pack up and move to Soo?"

"Er?" His thunder stolen, the priest stared at the crowd in bleary-eyed confusion. "She's not dead?"

"Well, she is from a social standpoint," said the innkeeper's wife. "I've heard there's nothing to do there except weaving and maybe a little beadwork."

"And cow-tipping," added the innkeeper. "Always the cow-tipping."

"Repent or face a life of cow-tipping" wasn't something the priest could say in his ominous voice. But before he had worked out a better alternative than "bovine molestation," the crowd's attention had drifted back to the catapult, which the tavern owner was struggling to fit with a new rope. The priest let his shoulders droop.

"Relax," said the young woman standing nearest to him. "We're taking the wall down, so you can start overcharging adventurers again in no time."

The priest drew himself up in righteous indignation. "I do _not_ overcharge for my services."

"Then why does it cost more to heal adventurers with better armor?"

"The gods favor progressive taxation."

A cheer from the direction of the catapult indicated that the rope had been restored and the ghastly machine was ready to scare away potential customers again. The priest sighed and began to shuffle back to his temple, which he figured might at least be quieter than the streets.

"Where are we going to keep it now?" wondered a voice from the throng.

"I dunno," replied another. "The temple yard was working."

Gritting his teeth, the priest ripped the dish towel from the temple entrance and stomped inside. He was about to slam the doors behind him for effect when an eager voice in the crowd said, "Ooh! Can I be the new priest?"

Whirling in holy fury, the priest saw the man who had earlier tried to seize control of the local theocracy hopping frantically up and down, waving his arms in the air. "No," he snarled, letting the temple doors punctuate the answer for him.

These things were supposed to blow over in a few days. They were not supposed to leave catapults behind when they did.

Visions of fantastically wealthy, bleeding adventurers refusing to set foot in Kazave flashed through his mind, and the priest found himself wondering if it would be possible to request a transfer to Lancel. He'd heard that Lancel attracted a lot of people with too much gold and not enough self-preservation.

A crash came from outside, followed by cheering. The priest gritted his teeth. If the catapult was going to become the village's idea of a way to pass an idle afternoon, he was going to start drafting that transfer request. The priest sat down at his desk with a quill pen and a piece of parchment and set to work.

He was two lines in when he heard another crash, followed by a cry of "Watch it! That was close!"

The priest looked up thoughtfully, set down his pen, and tore the letter in half. After all, it was his sacred duty to provide his people with healing. Expensive healing.

Humming to himself, the priest opened wide the temple doors and made his way back behind the altar, awaiting the first round of disasters.

There was a lot to be said for compromise.


End file.
